There is a strong trend in the marketplace for delivering messages in a one-way communication system, such as a paging system, over wide geographic areas. Subscribers of such a service typically desire to roam over distant geographic areas, such as different cities that are possibly in different states of the country, and be able to receive messages from originating parties or callers while the subscribers are roaming from point-to-point.
Further, a group of subscribers can constitute a team which needs their data and communications coordinated on a regular basis. For example, a sales team comprises one hundred salespeople and at least one salesmanager. The salesmanager maintains a price book with the latest information on a large assortment of products and services. Each salesperson also maintains a price book corresponding to the salesmanager price book. These "price books" are preferably maintained electronically in portable devices, such as in personal computers with databases, to allow individuals efficient access to large amounts of data. Further, each team member carries on their person a portable selective call receiver for receiving messages transmitted by the communication system over the wide geographic coverage areas. These messages can communicate information between team members. However, these messages today are directed to the user of the receiving portable selective call receiver and are normally available for display to the user. The user after manually inspecting a received sales data would update one or more local databases with the received sales data by manually locating each sales database in the portable computing device, manually launching the database application with each sales database, locating the entry location for the sales data, and manually entering the sales data in the particular database. This process is very tedious, error prone, and requires a human user to be present at all times that sales data is received and to be updated locally in a portable unit, which is very burdensome on the user.
Therefore, although there's a strong need in the marketplace for providing message delivery over a paging communication channel over a wide geographic coverage area to automatically coordinate the data and communication needs of subscribing workgroups and team members, no known communication system offers such automatic coordination of data and communication between subscribers.